Notes From the Field: London Edition

Beth Perry

When people love what they do, it shows. They can brighten up a whole room with their enthusiasm and excitement about the work they’re doing. At the recent London stop of our Commerce Marketing Spotlight series, our Notes From the Field session was full of such excitement as three Bronto users shared highlights of their recent successes.

Notes was the capstone learning session of a day-long event offering hands-on training, marketing best practices and great advice from some of today’s top commerce marketers. While our speakers all have different business models and ways of using email, each has a similar commitment to innovation and measurable results. And each spoke so enthusiastically about their businesses and recent campaigns that they left the audience feeling energized, inspired and ready to get to work.

Test It Out

Isabelle Schweich, Ecommerce Trading Manager at Swoon Editions, was the first to speak. Swoon Editions is an online-only retail furniture company that sells limited-edition designs and launches new items, sourced from all over the world, every day.

One of the challenges Swoon faced was efficiency in acquisition spend, particularly for social channels, such as Facebook, which opens up access to a huge pool of prospective customers. They wanted to tailor communications to these new prospects but found it difficult with very few details about this group. But by capturing acquisition data and passing it through Bronto, they were able to leverage known attributes to start sending more personalized messaging and trigger separate welcome workflows based on that information. They could even test different incentives per source, which resulted in a CPL reduction of 46%.

This new initiative opened up a whole new way to test within the critical early stage of the buying cycle. As Schweich said, furniture tends to have a long consideration period, so it’s important to tailor the content you’re sharing in the first 90 days as you introduce new leads to the brand and get them to the point of conversion. Being able to test what works and what doesn’t is a key strategy to discovering how to win customers – and earn their loyalty.

Give It Away

Joreen Singh, Marketing Manager at Bambino Mio, spoke next and gave some great inspiration for how to host a giveaway the right way. Bambino Mio is the leading brand of cloth nappies (diapers) and accessories worldwide. They’ve grown rapidly in the past two years and now export to over 50 markets around the world. They’ve recently focused a lot of effort on lead generation as they enter new markets: How can they reach new customers and cut through the noise of the competition?

A free nappy campaign met their objectives: Build brand awareness in emerging markets and increase lead generation. Customers received a branded email containing a unique voucher for a free nappy, driving them to a set landing page through a number of channels. This campaign increased their traffic by 966% from the previous week and increased revenue by 500% from the previous month as many customers went on to purchase lots of other products when redeeming their coupon. Singh said this was the best they’ve seen out of this kind of campaign: an 88.9% open rates, 83.6% click-through rate and 56.1% conversion rate.

Make a Recommendation

Jason Peters, CRM Manager at Entertainment Magpie, rounded out the presentation with some thoughts on the effectiveness of personalized recommendations, highlighting the success they’ve had since implementing them a few months ago.

They already had a shopping feed in place, but it wasn’t quite up to par. Peters wanted customers to see products that were personalized to their specific tastes, not just your basic in or out of stock alerts, which first called for the addition of custom fields that pertained to their business and audience. Along with several others, they added genre to capture their customers’ interest and product grade to accurately reflect an item’s condition – the brand sells both new and refurbished products.

Once those fields were in place, the team implemented personalized recommendations that synced with the customer’s preferences and previous order information, which Peters says has been revelatory for the company. By using these tailored recommendations in their basket abandonment programs, they have seen a 2-3x increase in click rate, and conversions increased 2x as well. Peters says the opportunities to use recommendations are limitless – they work well in birthday program campaigns, sales promotions and even product upsells. And for Entertainment Magpie, they have resulted in an increase for every campaign they’ve tried.

Want to hear from other successful commerce marketers? Join us for Commerce Marketing Spotlight. We’ll be in New York October 12 and then off to Los Angeles October 26 before heading to Australia. For complete details, visit our website.